GaspeeVirtual Archives
Was the Gaspee burned to protect slavery??

An op-ed battle from the Providence Journal, June, 2020

1:  It's time to rethink the Gaspee Affair

by Joey La Neve DeFrancesco
Providence Journal, June 7, 2020

During the first week in June, Rhode Islanders usually gather for a weeklong celebration of the Gaspee Affair, culminating in the ritual burning of a model British ship. The festivities commemorate the anniversary of Colonial Rhode Islanders exploding the British vessel Gaspee in June 1772. Though little discussed outside New England, the Gaspee Affair was the first bloodshed between colonists and the British and led directly to events culminating in the Revolutionary War. Across our state, we universally remember the attack as a heroic strike against the tyrannical British.

It is, however, far past time that we reevaluate the Gaspee Affair in the context of the slave economy. The Rhode Islanders who burned the Gaspee were wealthy traders who had made fortunes in the business of slavery, and were furious with British incursions into their sordid industry. In this context, the Gaspee raid emerges not as a spark for freedom, but rather the self-interested violence of slave merchants protecting their economic and political power.

Rhode Island’s 18th-century economy was fully embedded in the business of slavery. Thousands of black and indigenous enslaved people labored within the colony itself, making up some 10% of the population. The colony first entrenched itself in the slave economy via the bilateral trade with the West Indies, shipping New England-produced goods to slave plantations in the Caribbean. By the 1720s, Rhode Islanders began directly transporting enslaved people from West Africa: merchants brought Rhode Island-distilled rum to the coast of west Africa, traded the spirits for enslaved people, then sold the enslaved people to West Indian sugar plantations for molasses to distill into more rum. So formed the notorious Triangle Trade. Rhode Islanders emerged as the most prominent North American slave traders, far exceeding other British colonies.

Following the end of the Seven Years War in 1763, Britain began more vigorously regulating colonists. The Sugar Act of 1764, for instance, sought to tax New Englanders’ rum trade with the West Indies. The taxes incensed Rhode Island’s elite, including Stephen Hopkins, who complained in his influential “Rights of the Colonies Examined” that the measures would destroy the Colonies’ economy: “Putting an end to the importation of foreign molasses at the same time puts an end to all the costly distilleries in these colonies, and to the rum trade to the coast of Africa.”

So as the Gaspee entered Rhode Island’s waters in 1772, Rhode Island’s ruling class was already furious with the British. The men who gathered to attack the Gaspee were not common people, but rather the colony’s powerful merchants and manufacturers such as John Brown, Simeon Potter and Joseph Tillinghast. Nearly all had a deep economic interest in preserving slavery, and many personally owned enslaved people.

Across the Colonies, the elite were anxious with imagined British interference in the slave economy. The very same month of the Gaspee attack, British courts handed down the Somerset decision, which effectively outlawed slavery within England. Combined with the Proclamation Line of 1763 and other events, colonists (incorrectly) fantasized that Britain was destabilizing the Colonies through gradual abolition.

After the Gaspee attack, the only witness who emerged to testify against the raiders was Aaron Briggs, a man of likely African and indigenous ancestry living as a coerced laborer on Prudence Island. The elite closed ranks and attempted to discredit Briggs with racist insults. The Rev. John Allen denounced him in his popular pamphlet “An Oration on the Beauties of Liberty,” bemoaning that the British were threatening colonists with being “confin’d and tried for [their] life by the accusation of a negro.”

In the context of Rhode Island’s historical economy, the material interests of the attackers, the larger role of slavery in inspiring Colonial rebellion, and the treatment of Aaron Briggs, we must reconsider our memory of the Gaspee Affair.

Joey La Neve DeFrancesco is a public historian, musician and organizer.

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2:  Gaspee raid was not tied to slave trade

By Patrick T. Conley
Providence Journal, June 13, 2020

Raiders from Providence and Bristol burned the British customs ship, Gaspee, on June 9 and 10, 1772, thereby striking America’s “first blow for freedom.” Now, as the 250th anniversary of that daring event has arrived, a modern Gaspee raider states that “It’s time to rethink the Gaspee Affair” (Journal, 6-8-2020). Joey La Neve DeFrancesco contends that such rethinking reveals that “the Gaspee raid emerges not as a spark for freedom but rather the self-interested violence of slave merchants protecting their economic and political power.”

He begins his anti-American diatribe with a statement about the 18th-century Rhode Island slave trade that is generally correct: “Rhode Islanders emerged as the most prominent North American slave traders, far exceeding other Colonies.” From there, his argument goes downhill.

Early philosophers exposed a logical and historical fallacy they described as “post hoc ergo propter hoc.” It simply holds that if an event followed a prior event, then the prior event was the cause. The author believes that because the Rhode Island slave trade preceded the Gaspee raid, it was, therefore, its cause. Actually, the anger that sparked the Gaspee raid had many and more important provocations. It was a response to a series of administrative, revenue and navigation acts imposed upon the Colonies from 1763 onward as part of an imperial reorganization following England’s costly victory over France in the Great War for Empire.

Rhode Island’s resentment in 1772 stemmed mainly from what Oliver Dickerson, authoritative historian of the navigation acts, calls “customs racketeering,” namely the harsh and draconian enforcement of the acts of trade by an independent board of customs commissioners who were given by statute (the Townshend Act of 1767) a percentage of the value of the Colonial ships and cargoes they seized.

Stephen Hopkins, cited for his opposition to the Sugar Act of 1764, a duty on imported molasses that was distilled into rum for the triangular slave trade, is misleading. The act was repealed by the Revenue Act of 1766, well before the Gaspee incident, and by far, the main theme of Hopkins’ “Rights of Colonies Examined” (1764) was not economic but constitutional. He referred to the broad rights of “Americans” and suggested a pioneering federal theory of empire, with Parliament legislating on matters of imperial concern — war, trade and international relations — but with Colonial assemblies possessing sovereignty in local affairs, including taxation.

Influenced by his Quaker beliefs and his own professions of liberty, Hopkins freed his slaves in 1773, and during the following year, while serving in the state legislature, he cosponsored a statute that prohibited the importation of “Negroes” to Rhode Island.

This statute was the first in a series of measures by which most Rhode Islanders attempted to atone for their cardinal sin of slave trading. The decades of the 1770s and 1780s could well be described locally as “the Era of Atonement.”

During this Revolutionary period, the state’s large and influential Quaker community led the attack on these twin evils of slavery and slave trading. In 1778, the General Assembly passed a wartime enlistment law proposed by Gen. James Mitchell Varnum, which stipulated that those slaves who enlisted in Rhode Island’s “colored regiment” would be granted freedom upon completion of their term of duty. A 1779 law forbade the sale of Rhode Island slaves outside the state without their consent.

The Emancipation Act of 1784, however, was the most significant of the several Revolution-inspired statutes relating to blacks. With a preface invoking the sentiments of English political theorist John Locke — namely, that “all men are entitled to life, liberty and property” — the gradual manumission measure gives freedom to all children born to slave mothers after March 1, 1784. It put slavery on the road to extinction.

In 1787, only five weeks following the adjournment of the Constitutional Convention, the General Assembly passed an act, initiated by influential and irrepressible Quakers, prohibiting any Rhode Island citizen from engaging in the slave trade. In vigorous language, this statute termed the nefarious traffic “inconsistent with justice, and the principles of humanity, as well as the laws of nature, and that more enlightened and civilized sense of freedom which has of late prevailed.” The proposed federal Constitution that gave temporary protection to this trade was not an instrument to be warmly embraced. Thus, the state’s antislavery contingent took refuge in antifederalism and, during the critical year 1790, this connection nearly thwarted ratification.

The slave trade provision of the Constitution provoked such opposition that an amendment (XVII) was specifically proposed and approved that exhorted Congress to ban the traffic immediately. Rhode Island was the only state to suggest such an amendment during the ratification struggle.

Let us view the Gaspee as an event occurring at the outset of this age of atonement and not as an effort to perpetuate an increasingly reprehensible economic activity.

The Gaspee critic made other assertions that are also unsound — the Somerset ruling, the Proclamation Line of 1763 and Aaron Briggs — but space does not permit rebuttal.

Suffice to say that the iconoclastic DeFrancesco, who lists himself as a “public historian, musician and community organizer,” as a historian, is off-key and disorganized.


Patrick T. Conley is Rhode Island’s historian laureate and the 1977 grand marshal of the Gaspee Days parade.

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3:  From Dr. Steve Park:
Every generation gets to write its own history. Each revises its interpretation of the past based upon evidence discovered by the previous ones.
A. The Rhode Island School (1966 to the present)
In 1966 a group of concerned citizens formed the Gaspee Days Committee.  This non-profit organization hosts the incredibly popular Gaspee Days every June in Pawtuxet, Rhode Island. This group was wildly successful in bringing public awareness to the Gaspee Affair, especially around the bicentennial of the event when then Governor referred to it as “America’s First Blow for Freedom.” Living in the shadow of Boston’s better-known Massacre and Tea Party, the Rhode Island School has been very successful in making every K-12 student in the state aware of this important event in the history of Narragansett Bay.

The Rhode Island School was heavily influenced by nineteenth century Whig historians like Arnold, Bartlett, and Staples. Scholars like Richard M. Deasy and Lawrence J. DeVaro dove deeply into the archives at the Rhode Island Historical Society, the State Archives, the libraries of John Hay, Rockefeller, and Carter Brown. 100 years of fiction and non-fiction writing confirmed the Gaspee Affair as an important milestone in the history of the rise of liberty, independence from foreign rule, and the right to a trial in the vicinage. Subsequent scholars like [Leonard] Bucklin, John Concannon, John McNiff, and Adam Blumenthal have continued public awareness through conferences, park programs, and digitally engaging and visually appealing programs.
Virtual Projects:

Digital Archive 1997 – present
 B. The Imperial School (2005 – 2016)
While heavily indebted to the Rhode Island School, in 2005 Steven Park tried to examine “the two sides to a story.” Finding that Governor Wanton was required to send his findings back to London after the conclusion of the Royal Commission of Inquiry in 1773; Park found more than 350 documents in the Public Record Office in Kew Garden. More sympathetic to the Loyalist tradition, Park started to uncouple the “Gaspee Raid” and the “Gaspee Affair.” Finding that civilian arrest warrants for British Sea Officers were not that rare; Park argued that the Gaspee raid was actually about Jacob Greene’s rum and the seizure of the Fortune.  The Gaspee Affair, on the other hand, was created months later by a sermon given by a little-known, recently immigrated, Baptist preacher in Boston. His sermon was republished so many times it was one of the most widely – circulated pamphlets of the pre-independence period.

What if the original raiders were not thinking deeply about the traditional rights of Englishmen but rather more about restitution for their financial losses at the hands of Lieutenant Dudingston’s painfully effective patrolling? The raiders went silent, leaving the interpretation of the Gaspee Raid in the hands of fire-brand patriots and Sons of Liberty like Samuel Adams and John Allen.  In their capable hands it became “An Affair.”
C. The Race and Justice School (2012-present)
With the scholarly output of Brown University’s Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice and the examination of the University’s historic ties to racial slavery, a new generation of scholars will be able to take historical scholarship into new directions. Joey La Neve DeFranscsco’s article is an example of this scholarship and research in a new direction. Using evidence from the Rhode Island School and some from Park’s book; he has tied the raid on the Gaspee to the rum trade and the trans-Atlantic slave trade ---directly to Rhode Island’s elites. A new generation of younger scholars will be able to provide new perspectives on our shared past.

Steven Park. PhD is Director of Academic and Scholarly Technology at Wheaton College (Illinois) and is author of The Burning of His Majesty's Schooner Gaspee, (2016).

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4: From Dr. John Concannon

First of all, please do not confuse our Gaspee Days Committee with the historical narrative.  The Gaspee Days Committee (http://www.Gaspee.COM) is a purely commemorative organization that officially celebrates, not the mere burning of a ship, but the British overreaction to the burning of the Gaspee, thus creating the events that would lead to the reforming of the permanent Committees of Correspondence, followed by the First Continental Congress, and culminating at the Second Continental Congress, wherein our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain was composed. In my own defense, we have strived to present a balanced, fair, and outreaching narrative of the many ways in which one can interpret the facts surrounding the burning of the Gaspee.

People, please tone down your own narratives that, to me at least, seems inflamed by the current BLM, and perhaps the "1619 Project" of the NY Times (see below). I realize that we must all be cognizant and apologetic for slavery in the past. Racist attitudes should be eliminated. But those things do not change the facts, just the perspective of how we write the narratives.

In my opinion, the DeFrancesco writings were full of errors of interpretation and outright misrepresentation of facts.

It is indeed ironic that Dr. Lawrence DeVaro, who wrote the first doctoral thesis on the Gaspee Affair, once confided to me that, although he later became a Professor of History concentrating on the institution of slavery in America, in his previous 1972-1973 research he had completely missed the clues that the event may have had significant ties to people involved in the slave trade.

As webmaster of the Gaspee Virtual Archives for the past  27 years, I will unabashedly  claim credit for researching and presenting the links between select leaders of the attack with the rum distillery business, and thence to slavery. These ties were not 'discovered' by Steven Park, Andrew Stewart, or Joey Neve DeFrancesco; they were developed by me as I did biographical analysis of each known Gaspee raider.

Many of the ship captains that served as tactical leaders in the attack, were indeed tied directly or indirectly to the business of slavery, but this was also the case for many ship captains and merchants throughout the coastal areas of the American colonies. But please do not rush to indict everyone involved;  the vast majority of the Gaspee raiders were young men in their late teens and twenties whose links to the slave trade were made distant by the necessity of their employment in ship-building, and other trades or crafts in the local Providence area. Some raiders were opposed to slavery but still held 'patriotic' values that detested the oppression of British interference and taxation (see Benoni Simmons, et al.) Many of these men came from very humble lives, such as the young dockworkers from Bristol (see Ezra Ormsbee, et al.) It is more likely that the leaders of the Gaspee attack that were dressed in colonial finery were deliberately dressed so as to make an impression that they had the backing of the colonial government, or as judicial officials.

The colonists were not much bothered by thoughts of abolition...

Dr. Conley's response admittedly misses several points, but his analysis of Stephen Hopkins writings in The Rights of Colonies Examined are bolstered by current writings by Ken Shumate in the Journal of the American Revolution,
In my analysis, Dr. Park's abbreviated historiography of the Gaspee Affair is not helpful, and merely presents an apologetic attempt to further his particular take on John Allen's sermon.



John Concannon is historian for the Gaspee Days Committee, and has been webmaster of the Gaspee Virtual Archives at gaspee.org since 1993.  In his other life Dr. Concannon is a practicing pediatrician in Cranston, RI.
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5: On the other hand.....

The lie about America
By Mackubin Owens
Providence Journal, Jun 16, 2020
The orgy of destruction that has occurred in the wake of George Floyd’s death has been justified by a lie — that the United States is irredeemably racist to the core. Unfortunately, our educational system has peddled this lie for more than a generation. It has now achieved official status by means of The New York Times’ risible 1619 Project, which claims that the United States was founded on slavery and racism. The truth is exactly the opposite. America’s Founding — the real one, in 1776 — expressly rejected the argument that political systems should be based on oppression, including racial oppression. The essence of such systems was best summarized by the argument of the Athenians at Melos as recounted by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War: “Justice arises only between equals. As for the rest, the strong do what they will. The weak suffer what they must.”

Before the creation of the United States, the world was divided between those “born booted and spurred,” with the natural right to rule over others “born with saddles on their backs.” At the time of the American Founding, slavery was a worldwide phenomenon. Africans sold other Africans into the Atlantic slave trade. Philosophers may have condemned such injustice, but rulers continued to rule as they always had — the strong oppressing the weak; the master oppressing the slave.

The United States was founded on a different claim, articulated in the Declaration of Independence — that human beings are equal in their possession of natural rights and that, accordingly, no one has the natural right to rule over another without the latter’s consent.
The dilemma facing the Founders was that the United States had inherited an institution at odds with the principles of the Declaration of Independence — slavery. But as men of the Enlightenment, the Founders — even the slaveholders among them — believed that since slavery was both unprofitable and a relic of barbarism, it was on the road to extinction. With that belief in mind, the drafters of the Constitution compromised on the issue of slavery in order to secure the union necessary to preserve the infant Republic. But slavery persisted, and it took a war to end it.

That war was an attempt to fulfill the promise of the Declaration. As the late Harry Jaffa once wrote, “It is not wonderful that a nation of slave-holders, upon achieving independence, failed to abolish slavery. What is wonderful, indeed miraculous, is that a nation of slave-holders founded a new nation on the proposition that ‘all men are created equal,’ making the abolition of slavery a moral and political necessity.”

The Civil War and the abolition of slavery did not, of course, end racial prejudice and racism. Neither has the expansion of civil rights over the last century and a half. It is undeniable that we as Americans have not always lived up to our own principles. The unpleasant fact is that some people are racist. Many others harbor racial prejudice in their hearts. But while racism and racial prejudice persist among individuals, the founding principles of the United States are explicitly non-racist.

Prejudice is a part of human nature. In that regard, the example of Frederick Douglass is instructive. The former slave, an ardent abolitionist who had originally condemned the Constitution as pro-slavery, came to understand that it was instead fundamentally an anti-slavery document and that without it and the Union that it created, slavery would never have been ended in America. He also understood the role of prudence in politics. While he clashed with Lincoln during the war on policy regarding the employment of Black troops, he remarked that although Lincoln shared the prejudices of the white man, he was able to rise above them.
The principles upon which the United States was founded are fundamentally non-racist. As citizens, we are obligated, like Lincoln, to rise above our prejudices and strive to live up to our own principles.

Mackubin Owens, of Newport, a monthly contributor, is a senior fellow of the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.
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Originally Posted to Gaspee Virtual Archives 6/2020    Last Revised 6/2020    Slavery.htm